As more and more types of services run on the Internet, higher requirements are put forward on fault detection and management of a carrier-class network, operators may ask equipment manufacturers to provide switching equipment and optical network equipment supporting OAM (Operation, Administration and Maintenance) functions to ensure that the Ethernet also can provide carrier-class requirements, including functions of timely detection, recovery and management of network exception error or exception problem such as service degradation and failure.
As an access device of an IP-based base station, a Packet Transport Network (PTN) device generally is connected to a Layer 2 Virtual Private Network (L2VPN) by configuring a Port, Port+VLAN (Virtual Local Area Network) for a UNI. When failures occur in base station services (for example, service interruption), means need to be provided to detect whether the base station can be connected to the UNI of the PTN device.
At present, a Connectivity Fault Management (CFM) solution and a Media Access Control (MAC)-PING solution are mainly used. In the CFM solution, a CFM and an MAC-PING may be used to detect the connectivity between the base station and the UNI of the PTN device, but it is impossible to ensure all base stations support the CFM. Whereas in the MAC-PING solution, connectivity detection of some nodes is unavailable unless MAC address information of a base station is known. However, in some cases the MAC address is unknown. As the L2VPN technology is used increasingly widely, demands for L2VPN network maintenance and fault location naturally become necessary. Therefore, accurate and rapid fault detection seems more and more important.
This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.